Lecture: Our Quest to Understand the Mind-Body w. Urte Laukaityte

Dette foredrag er på engelsk // This lecture will take place in English

For centuries, phenomena such as placebo effects, hypnosis, and psychosomatic symptoms have puzzled us and challenged our understanding of the mind–body relationship. Only recently have empirical scientific tools made it possible to study this connection systematically.

We tend to think of symptoms as accurate read-outs of underlying disease processes. When visiting a doctor, patients are asked to list their symptoms, which are then used to work backwards toward a possible diagnosis. This approach assumes a tight and reliable link between symptoms and disease. However, a wide range of phenomena calls this assumption into question.

Symptoms do not always stem from underlying disease, as in psychosomatic or functional disorders. They do not always improve when disease is targeted, as seen in placebo effects. Expectations can also shape bodily experiences in powerful ways, as in hypnosis. Although such top-down effects have long been treated as either dubious or too mysterious to study rigorously, this is now changing rapidly. Drawing on research from the cognitive sciences, this talk outlines what we have learned so far about the mind–body connection and considers what may come next. About the lecturer: Urte Laukaityte is a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University working on the project “Rationality, Destigmatisation, and Mental Disorder.” She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and studies topics such as predictive processing, placebo effects, and functional disorders. Her research bridges philosophy, cognitive science, and psychiatry, exploring how we understand mental states and symptoms. Read more about Urte: https://cas.au.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/nyhed/artikel/urte-laukaityte-new-postdoc-at-the-department-of-philosophy-and-history-of-ideas

Event details: 

The event costs 60 DKK per person incl. coffee and cake.

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